


whatever remains, however improbable

by opinionhaver69



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Foreshadowing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:02:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27403963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opinionhaver69/pseuds/opinionhaver69
Summary: Dubiously, Camilla glanced back at the bones. “Fire?” She felt abruptly stupid, repeating Palamedes’ words back to him, so she shook her head frustratedly and elaborated. “Why fire, in particular?”“Oh, well, to put it simply, fire is elementary, my dear.”Camilla looked blank.“No?” Palamedes looked briefly crestfallen, then coughed awkwardly. “Alright, never mind."
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 7
Kudos: 23
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	whatever remains, however improbable

**Author's Note:**

  * For [surreptitiously](https://archiveofourown.org/users/surreptitiously/gifts).



> For the Yuletide prompt about Camilla and Palamedes solving crimes. Technically they don't really ~solve~ much in this one but I wanted to lean into the Palamedes-as-Holmes, Camilla-as-Watson feel that was also kiiind of there in Doctor Sex, so that's mostly what this is with a little sprinkling of bittersweet foreshadowing on top. Merry Christmas!
> 
> (AN: they're both sixteen in this but I didn't check the warning for underage because I don't think there's any content here that really requires it. Their relationship is the same as it's presented in canon, i.e. Camilla is likely in perhaps-unrequited love with Palamedes and they're completely devoted to each other either way but their dynamic can be interpreted as platonic or romantic depending on how you choose to read it.)

Eleven days after Palamedes Sextus’ sixteenth birthday, Camilla Hect turned a corner in a relatively disused wing near the base of the Library and promptly fell over a discarded human ribcage.

“Oh!” she exclaimed involuntarily as she hit the ground, twisting oddly so that first her backside then her elbows landed hard on the dusty wooden floorboards. She was surprised less by the ribcage than by the fall; bones were a common sight in the sprawling Library of the Sixth House, but a cavalier - and especially a cavalier of her calibre - was not often toppled unawares.

“Camilla?” said Palamedes worriedly as he rounded the corner in turn. “What are you - oh.” He drew up short, his eyes landing on her prostrate form, then stretched out a hand to help her up. She took it - his skin felt dry, and comfortingly warm - and got to her feet, brushing the dust off the seat of her pants with a brief grimace of distaste. “You should be careful in here,” Palamedes said vaguely, his pale eyes roaming over the dimly-lit corridor. “These floorboards are quite uneven, I suspect.”

“Yes,” Camilla said, adding, a touch waspishly, “and also there’s bones on them.”

“What?” said Palamedes sharply, abruptly relinquishing Camilla’s hand. Again he cast his eyes around and then, finally spotting the ribcage, stooped towards it eagerly, peering through his spectacles. “Well, I say,” he proclaimed after a long moment of silent examination, sounding rather mystified and, Camilla suspected, entirely thrilled about it.

In fairness to him it was quite an odd tableau, thought Camilla, having recovered enough from her fall to regard the scene with a newly impassive objectivity. The bones - unpinned and unmarked, so in all probability not those of a skeleton servitor - gleamed oddly white in the darkness between Palamedes and herself. They could be leftovers of the experiment of some ghoulish Sixth Scholar, she supposed, but it seemed implausible, here; Camilla and Palamedes had been in the process of exploring a row of long-abandoned offices, belonging to a now-defunct subset of the Incunabula department, which Palamedes had insisted they mine for any forgotten information that might be of any help in his ongoing quest to cure Dulcinea of the Seventh of her myriad ailments. It was unlikely that anyone else had been down here in centuries, save for the occasional maintenance or cleaning sweep. And yet -

“These bones haven’t been here very long at all,” said Palamedes quietly.

Camilla stepped closer, frowning slightly. The strangeness of the situation, heightened by the inanimate hush of the ancient hallway, was putting her decidedly on edge. “How can you tell?” she asked. “Psychometry?” She hadn’t seen him touch the bones - and it would be immensely against protocol if he had - but his back was half-turned to her, so it wasn’t at all impossible that he'd done it and she just hadn’t noticed.

“No,” said Palamedes, straightening up with a sigh. “Heavens, Cam, we shouldn’t need to rely on necromancy for everything, our minds ought to be perfectly competent on their own - the dust, look. Everywhere, on the floor, and quite thick too, but only a very fine layer on the bones themselves.”

“Oh,” said Camilla, duly chastised. “Yes - I see.” The lack of dust - did that account for the bones’ alarming whiteness? She was distinctly unnerved still. It was highly unlikely there was anything dangerous about the bones themselves, or the corridor, but even so… She placed a hand on the hilt of one of the two knives she had holstered at her hip (a recent addition to her daily ensemble, lightly frowned on by some of the stuffier Sixth elders) and allowed herself to be soothed by the proximity of the blade, its keen sharpness, her own lethal skill with it.

Palamedes made a low murmuring sound, crouching and bending even further over the ribcage until the tip of his nose nearly touched the outward curve of one of the middle ribs. “Well, it wouldn’t hurt to be exact, though, surely they'll only slap me on the wrist when they find out,” he said eventually, more to himself than to her, and, reaching out, he pressed the tips of his fingers firmly against the sternum. Distinctly, Camilla thought: _curiosity killed the necromancer._

Almost immediately Palamedes yelped, stepping backwards and pulling his hand away in one fluid motion, cradling his fingers to his chest as if burned, which is exactly what he deserved for succumbing to temptation instead of leaving the bones alone and reporting them straight to Collections. Camilla rolled her eyes and held her own fingers to the bone. It was perfectly cool, smooth and inoffensive to the touch. Whatever Palamedes had felt, then, was almost certainly necromantic in origin; she levelled her gaze at him and waited.

“Well,” he said at last, his tone grim. “I was right; these bones have been here fifteen, maybe twenty years at most. And - Cam - it would seem, I think, that we’re dealing with a murder.”

“A murder?” Camilla's hand tightened reflexively over her weapon. Her muscles were instantly tense, her body coiled like a whip about to crack and shatter the suspended stillness of that musty space.

“Not a murder in the _traditional_ sense, perhaps,” Palamedes continued, “but as far as I’m concerned, a murder nonetheless. An abominable thing, by all means…” He trailed off, looking thoughtfully down at the bones, then said again, softly, “Yes, abominable, certainly.”

“Palamedes.” His name in her voice sounded clipped, frustrated, and Palamedes glanced up again, surprised. “Oh, I’m sorry, Cam,” he said, moving closer to her and patting her reassuringly on the arm nearest him. “No, I doubt there’s anything we need to worry about. Not now, at least, it’s been long enough since - well, that.” He nodded ruefully towards the bones.

“What did you mean, ‘not a murder in the traditional sense?’” Camilla probed, her hackles still high. Her ability to follow Palamedes to his conclusions without much in the way of assistance was nigh unparalleled, but her own intellect was useless here; whatever necromantic conversation Palamedes was having with the bones excluded her by nature, and Palamedes’ distraction made him even more cryptically unhelpful than usual. She shifted in place, rationally aware that Palamedes was likely correct about there being no danger, still semi-consciously noting how best to protect him from a threat coming at them from any direction down that long and gloomy corridor.

“Well, in the sense that the victim was already dead when the murder occurred,” said Palamedes matter-of-factly.

“What?” said Camilla, nonplussed. She frowned and lowered her shoulder-blades a fraction of an inch. "Explain," she commanded flatly.

“What I felt when I touched the bones…” Palamedes shook his head animatedly, his eyes bright behind the thick glass of his spectacles. “Some form of spirit magic, I think, used to anchor the soul to the body. To the bones, specifically.”

Understanding dawned, and with it, a creeping discomfort. “A revenant, then?” Camilla said uneasily.

“Of sorts, I suppose, but - well, I haven’t seen anything quite like this before. I wonder what the theorem…” Again, Palamedes trailed off, his brow furrowing, but after a second he caught himself and straightened up. “Whoever this was made themselves an intentional revenant, if you want to put it that way, but a revenant is just a shade, more or less, of the person; it loses coherency over time. With this, though - the soul was fixed somehow. For however long the bones existed, the person would remain, their consciousness squirrelled away safe somewhere.”

“But…” Camilla mulled it over in her mind, then said, her tone uncertain, “why, though? To be perfectly conscious but trapped like that, indefinitely - why?”

“Well,” began Palamedes, his eyes gentle with a vast and terrible kindness. “I suppose, to live. In whatever pitiful form remained available to them.”

“To live forever,” Camilla echoed absent-mindedly. Her posture had slackened; she leaned back against the wall suddenly, her hand falling away from her knife. “How awful.”

“Yes,” said Palamedes, then hesitated, reaching up to fiddle compulsively with the lopsided arm of his spectacles. “You’re right, it’s rather hard to imagine the circumstances that would drive a person to this. A terror of death so sublime - or perhaps work so important they feared to die without completing it.”

“I hate it,” said Camilla, and she shuddered, pushing herself away from the wall abruptly and pacing back and forth from one side of the narrow corridor to the other. She was a cavalier down to her bones, she could scarcely imagine an existence without corporeality, physicality, her heart hammering in her chest and the menacing weight of a dagger in her hand - but this was the Sixth, after all, where the cerebral reigned triumphant. Trust a Sixth necromancer to come up with something like this.

“It was all for nothing, anyway,” Palamedes said, looking sadly at the abandoned ribcage, and suddenly Camilla remembered what they’d been talking about. She slowed her steps, then came to a stop in front of the bones. “The murder,” she said haltingly. In her chest, her heart pounded resolutely on.

Palamedes sighed. “It’s what startled me, when I touched it; that terrible absence. I could feel the space they’d carved out for themselves - not a physical space, of course, but I could feel it nevertheless - and the dreadful void that was left when they were torn out of it.”

“Torn?” Camilla said. She felt slightly sick.

“Burned, more accurately,” said Palamedes, horrifyingly. “Some kind of fire, I suspect, burning extremely hot. Someone used it to forcibly separate the consciousness from the bones - that’s why they’re so white, in fact.”

Dubiously, Camilla glanced back at the bones. “Fire?” She felt abruptly stupid, repeating Palamedes’ words back to him, so she shook her head frustratedly and elaborated. “Why fire, in particular?”

“Oh, well, to put it simply, fire is elementary, my dear.”

Camilla looked blank.

“No?” Palamedes looked briefly crestfallen, then coughed awkwardly. “Alright, never mind. Basically, fire can be an incredibly destructive force: everything good, everything organic, it was all burned away, and so the consciousness had nothing left to cling to, spirit magic or no.”

 _An abominable thing._ Camilla recalled Palamedes’ earlier words and, finally understanding them, pressed her lips together firmly. As usual, he was right: abominable it undeniably was.

“Of course,” Palamedes continued, his tone glum, “it isn’t murder, technically speaking. But to terminate a human consciousness against its will, regardless of whether or not the vessel itself lives - well, the end result is the same, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Camilla said shortly. She bowed her head in brief deference to the consciousness that no longer clung to the bones at her feet. Where it had gone to now, no one living could say. “So, there’s nothing we can do, then?”

Palamedes’ shoulders drooped sorrowfully. “No, I suppose not. I’ll inform the necessary departments, of course, but… Well, even if it was considered a crime, two decades might prove rather too long to have much chance of even identifying the perpetrator, let alone locating them.” Gloomily he regarded the ribcage, lying placidly immobile and oblivious on the dusty floor between them. “Because I could not stop for Death,” he murmured quietly, then sighed.

“What’s that?” said Camilla.

“Oh, nothing,” said Palamedes. “Come on, let’s get out of here. We’re late for dinner.”

***

Later that night, as they sat facing each other across a small table, Palamedes cleared his throat and said, “Cam, there’s just one thing I’m not sure about, you know.”

Camilla looked up sharply. “Oh?” Palamedes hadn’t spoken much all evening; instead, he’d been somewhat preoccupied scratching out the beginnings of a theorem on a loose piece of flimsy, muttering to himself in a hushed tone at sporadic intervals. Camilla had a suspicion she knew what he was up to, and she didn’t much like it.

“It’s just…” Palamedes paused diplomatically, averting his eyes from her face. “Well, when I touched the bones and leapt away, did you think I was hurt? That they'd hurt me, somehow?”

Camilla shrugged, her steady gaze dark and unwavering. “It was all very quick, that part, so... But yes, as I remember it. You held your hand like it burned you.”

Palamedes frowned, the expression seeming to dim his exquisite eyes like silt muddying the surface of the Courtyard pool. “Then - if I can ask - why did you touch them too, right afterwards?”

 _Because my duty as your cavalier is to feel pain in your stead,_ Camilla thought, _and if I can’t feel it for you then I can at least feel it with you._ She shrugged, purposely vague, and out loud she said, “Oh, I don’t know. I just wasn’t thinking pragmatically, I suppose.”

Palamedes didn’t believe her for a second, she could see it on his face. They both knew it; Camilla Hect was unfailingly pragmatic, even in a crisis. But she knew too that of all the things that Palamedes Sextus was - her necromancer, her best friend, Master Warden of the Library, heir to the Sixth House of the Emperor Undying - he was nothing, nothing at all, if not the kindest person she’d ever known.

“Fair enough,” he said to her, and smiled.


End file.
